On July 13rd, 2011, Dr.Yun Wah Lam from City University of Hong Kong, was invited by Prof. Tang Huiru to visit WIPM, and had delivered an excellent report entitled “Planarian regeneration by time-lapse imaging and protemics”.

In the report, Dr.Yun Wah Lam described in detail that freshwater planarians were a classic model for studying the problems of development and regeneration. The planarians, with their notoriously plastic ontogeny, could grow a new one after being cut their heads off. These shocking worms provided a good opportunity for us to observe a very simple model of animal tissue regeneration. Their renewable body range was wide, and regeneration was pretty easy. And after that, Dr. Yun Wah Lam showed us that his research team used time-lapse imaging technology to record how mature stem cells regenerated damaged or lost organs and tissues, and understood the dynamic movement of stem cells with labeling methods. Studying mechanism of planarian regeneration could give enormous benefits to human regenerative medicine research.

Dr. Yun Wah Lam received his PhD training in the lab of Dr. Davina Opstelten at the University of Hong Kong. After receiving his PhD in 1997, he joined the group of Prof. Angus Lamond in Dundee, Scotland, where he developed an interest in the relationship of the architecture of mammalian cell nucleus and the regulation of gene expression. Recently, in collaboration with Jens Andersen (Odense) and Matthias Mann (Munich), he adopted the technique of SILAC (Stable Isotope Labeling with Amino acids in Cell culture) to quantify, by mass spectrometry, the global dynamics of the human nucleolar proteome in response to changes in metabolic conditions. He joined City University of Hong Kong in 2007.

At the end of the report, Dr. Yun Wah Lam carried out productive communication and discussion with research staff and students. And he hoped in-depth exchange.

Time-course of the same organism undergoing cephalic regeneration. The blastema is unpigmented. Numbers refer to days after decapitation.